Occupational Health & Safety
lborkowski | March 16, 2011The workers remaining at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station are braving extremely risky conditions as they try to avert a nuclear catastrophe. They are working to keep fuel rods - both those inside reactors and in the spent rods stored in ponds - cool enough to avert a Chernobyl-type meltdown, which would spew radioactive particles across the region. The most recent reports state that there are 50 workers remaining at the power station; all others have been evacuated as radiation levels have risen.
The New York Times' Keith Bradsher and Hiroko Tabuchi describe the workers'…
cmonforton | March 16, 2011Les Skramstad was a good, decent man who died in January 2007 from mesothelioma at 70 years young. Mesothelioma is a rare cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. Mr. Skramstad was a miner and laborer at the infamous vermiculite mine at Zonolite Mountain in Libby, Montana. Mr. Skramstad's death was clearly work-related, but when the Labor Department's annual census of work-related deaths was published the following year, reporting 5,488 fatal work injuries, his death was not included. As noted in Part 1 of this series, our nation's official count of work-related deaths is a census of fatal…
As world watches Japan's nuclear plants, damage to manufacturing infrastructure poses chemical risks
egrossman | March 15, 2011By Elizabeth Grossman
After posting yesterday's story, I began to learn what a hub of chemical-intensive industry the region of Japan most directly affected by the earthquake an tsunami is. Hit with varying degrees of damage from the earthquake and tsunami are more than a dozen major petrochemical plants, most, according to a March 14 Goldman Sachs memo to investors, built in the 1970s. In addition, numerous factories that manufacture agrochemicals, silicon wafers, semiconductors, photovoltaic cells, and other high-tech items have all suffered damage as have warehouses and shipping container…
egrossman | March 14, 2011by Elizabeth Grossman
Even before news of the crisis at the Fukushima and other Japanese nuclear power plants damaged by Friday's massive earthquake and tsunami arrived, raising public health concerns to an alarming level, the scenes of destruction prompted many questions about how public health - and that of first responders - would be protected during immediate rescue efforts, and later as clean up and restoration get underway. The awful loss of life demands much of our attention, but it's also essential to consider future health issues for those working on rescue and recovery.
Right now…
lborkowski | March 10, 2011Celeste wrote last week about how the Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward Jr. broke the story of how a previously unpublished report sent to Congress by the Mine Safety and Health Administration two weeks before the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster warned about serious enforcement lapses, including incomplete inspections and inadequate enforcement actions.
In addition to that story, another of Ward's Charleston Gazette articles last week highlighted another MSHA issue related to that mine disaster, which killed 29 miners at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, West Virginia:
U.S. Mine…
cmonforton | March 9, 2011"Death takes no holidays in industry and commerce," is how Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz described the toll of on-the-job death and disability for U.S. workers. The Secretary's remarks in 1968 were part of congressional hearings on legislation that ultimately established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). He suggested that because most work-related fatalities and injuries happen one or two at a time, day in and day out, the carnage continues
"because people don't realize its magnitude, and can't see the blood on the things they buy, on the food they eat, and the…
cmonforton | March 3, 2011Editors of The (WV) Charleston Gazette had perfect timing. On the morning of a congressional oversight hearing on the Labor Department's Mine Safety and Health Administration's (MSHA) performance, their front page featured an article by reporter Ken Ward Jr. about incomplete inspections and inadequate enforcement actions in 2009 in at least 25 of the agency's field offices. In "Report details MSHA lapses prior to disaster," Ward describes a previously unpublished letter sent to the Senate Appropriations Committee just two weeks before the Upper Big Branch disaster. The letter summarized…
cmonforton | February 28, 2011Roxanne Moyer wondered why managers at her husband's worksite would allow an obvious dangerous condition to exist. Workers could be so "close to molten steel [that it] just poured over on them." Her husband, Samuel Moyer, 32 died earlier this month at Arcelor Mittal's LaPlace, Lousiania steel mill in exactly that way. He was fatally burned with molten steel.
Mrs. Moyer sounds like a generous and forgiving soul, saying:
"I don't want it to happen to anybody else. And they've already changed things there. We've talked to fellow workers, and they've already put up a shield there and you can't…
lborkowski | February 25, 2011For its 40th anniversary, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has compiled a timeline of key milestones during its history. The big picture is a positive one:
Although accurate statistics were not kept at the time, it is estimated that in 1970 around 14,000 workers were killed on the job. That number fell to approximately 4,340 in 2009. At the same time, U.S. employment has almost doubled and now includes over 130 million workers at more than 7.2 million worksites. Since the passage of the OSH Act, the rate of reported serious workplace injuries and illnesses has declined from…
lborkowski | February 23, 2011By Dick Clapp
An ambitious paper was released in Boston last week, with subsequent media coverage in local, national and international outlets (see, for example the New York Times' Green Blog and Reuters). The first author, Paul Epstein, was interviewed on the Greenpeace ship the Arctic Sunrise, which was anchored in the Boston Harbor as part of its month-long "Coal Free Future Tour." The paper, which was just published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, was the result of a two-year collaborative effort that I participated in, as did Celeste Monforton, other academics from…
egrossman | February 22, 2011By Elizabeth Grossman
As I've watched the hearings House Republicans have been holding over the past couple of weeks on the economic impact of environmental and occupational health and safety regulations, I've been thinking about what I've learned about and seen of the working and environmental conditions in places that are now the hub of world manufacturing. I've been picturing the smog that hangs over Chinese cities. I've been thinking about the fatal despair of young high-tech workers at Foxconn and Samsung factories in China and South Korea, about the depressed wages and severe working…
cmonforton | February 21, 2011Freshman Congressman Larry D. Bucshon (R) of Evansville, Indiana is a cardiothoracic surgeon. His father was an underground coal miner and a member of the United Mine Workers Union for 37 years. Both his grandparents were coal miners. But, Republican-controlled Capitol Hill is now the Twilight Zone when I heard him say the following last week at a congressional hearing:
"I see a lot of patients with workplace related respiratory problems, some of which, to put it bluntly, are their own issue because they refuse to wear safety equipment regardless of whether there are regulations in place…
cmonforton | February 17, 2011Budget proposals are flying up and down Washington DC's Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Capitol Hill, as lawmakers and the President wrestle with funding plans for the current and next fiscal years. The House began debate this week on HR 1 (359 pages), a bill to appropriate funds to federal agencies for the remainder of FY 2011 (i.e., now through September 30, 2011). Many public protection agencies take a big hit under the House Republican's plan. The Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would take a 20% cut and the Environmental…
lborkowski | February 16, 2011By Elizabeth Grossman
Since release of its Final Report to the President on January 11th, the National Oil Spill Commission has released five additional papers (called "working papers") reviewing aspects of the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil disaster - three on February 3rd and two on February 8th. On February 11th, National Oil Spill Commissioners Don Boesch and Terry Garcia testified before two House subcommittees. The final report, the working papers, and the Commissioners' prepared testimony all take a critical look at the industry's preparation for such a disaster, examine the policies and…
cmonforton | February 14, 2011Annual sales revenue in the nation's restaurant industry tops $515 billion, but few of the 10.3 million workers in the industry earn a living wage. Those are the findings released today of comprehensive surveys of working conditions for 1,700 restaurant workers employed in Washington DC, Miami and Los Angeles. To date, more than 4,300 workers have been interviewed in eight cities in a project coordinated by Restaurant Opportunities Center United.
In Miami and Los Angeles, 75% and 71% of the restaurant workers surveyed, respectively, have no health insurance; the figure was 48% for…
cmonforton | February 8, 2011I was already tired of President Obama repeating the Republican's rhetoric about big, bad regulations, how they stifle job creation, put an unnecessary burden on businesses, and make our economy less competitive. He did so last month in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and in his State of the Union address. But yesterday, the White House went too far.
In advance of the President's speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the chief of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) threw two OSHA initiatives under the bus. Right after mentioning President Obama's January 18…
lborkowski | February 7, 2011Researchers from the University of Maryland School of Nursing and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine examined data from 71 Illinois and North Carolina hospitals and found that "patient deaths from pneumonia and acute myocardial infarction were significantly more likely in hospitals where nurses reported schedules with long work hours," reports Laura Walter in EHS Today. (The study itself appears in the January/February issue of Nursing Research.)
During nursing shortages in the 1980s, many hospitals switched nurses from 8-hour shifts to 12-hour shifts, and the pattern has…
lborkowski | February 4, 2011Ben McGrath has an excellent article on "the NFL and the concussion crisis" in the January 31st issue of the New Yorker. It's well worth a read (though it might change the way you see the Superbowl), but the thing I want to highlight is the roles of Alan Schwarz and the New York Times in raising the public's awareness of a problem that pervades football. (For our international readers, I'm referring to the US version of football - I realize that word means something different in the rest of the world.)
Specifically, the problem is the effects of repeated brain trauma, which football players…
cmonforton | February 3, 2011The contrast is striking. Look at the screenshot of the outcome of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs' (OIRA) review of two Labor Department rules to address flaws in our worker health and safety system. One is a proposal by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) to crack down on mine operators who habitually violate mine safety regulations. No more warning letters or slaps on the wrist. Once a mine operator is notified he has a "pattern of violations," a single serious violation of the law observed by an inspector at any time in the next 90 days will result in…
cmonforton | February 1, 2011The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production (LCSP) is known for challenging the status quo. Its scientists and policy analysts refuse to accept we have to live in a world where parents are worried about toxic toys, or companies feel forced to choose between earning profits and protecting the environment. Leave it to LCSP researchers to describe six cases of systemic worker health and safety failures, yet manage to identify small successes or opportunities to create them. That's the Lowell way:
"...infuse hope and opportunity into a system that may appear severely broken."
In "Lessons…